Antiterrorism, Race, and the New Frontier: American Exceptionalism, Imperial Multiculturalism, and the Global Security State

Abstract

Following Barack Obama's election as United States president, the illusion that the worst excesses of the Bush administration are now simply finished must be tempered by a sober assessment of the deeply consequential institutionalization of antiterrorism as the intransigent idiom of a new species of security state formation. Obama's assumption of responsibility for the conduct of the so-called War on Terror has committed him to the dominant ethos of antiterrorism and a multifaceted program of securitization, “domestically” and internationally. Furthermore, the task of reinvigorating United States nationalism by exalting American exceptionalism is one that deeply conjoins Obama with his predecessor. This is, perhaps, nowhere so evident as in Obama's dissimulations of the racial singularity and salience of his accession to the presidency. Indeed, he compulsively deracialized his election in favor of an American exceptionalist gesture of patriotic postracialism. This essay interrogates the relation between this “postracial” Americanism and a distinctly imperial multiculturalism. Through this “postracial” and assimilationist vision of empire, and by means of the crucial (racially ambiguous) figure of the Muslim, the United States has fashioned itself as the decisive police power of an incipient Global Security State, charged with putting in order the wild new frontiers of an unruly planet.